Author: Brian Morris
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Keywords: life, human, insects
Number of Pages: 320
Published: 2005-10-21
List price: $41.95
ISBN-10: 1845200756
ISBN-13: 9781845200756

What is the cultural importance of insects? Why do we spend a good deal of time and money in the West trying to exterminate insects? How are human-insect relations far more subtle in other societies? From bathtub-invaders to protein-source, insects play a multi-faceted role that has not previously been recognized. To investigate this fully, Brian Morris spent years in Malawi. Here, as in many tropical regions, insects have a profound impact on agriculture, the household, disease, and hence on oral literature, music, art, folklore, recreation, and religion. Much of the complexity of human-insec

Author: Melvyn Stokes
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Keywords: history, state
Number of Pages: 416
Published: 2002-03-01
List price: $115.00
ISBN-10: 1859735967
ISBN-13: 9781859735961

Historians are very much aware of the variety of national and international trends that have shaped historical inquiry in recent decades. Americanists, in particular, have been conscious of the growing importance of gender issues, the ’turn’ to questions of language and meaning, the increasing significance of cultural matters, and a new emphasis on regional history. The 1990s, moreover, saw a major movement to internationalize approaches to American history by emphasizing comparisons with other countries and cultures. By the end of the twentieth century it was by no means clear whe

Author: Jacques Ranciere
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Keywords: images, talking, fables, film
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2006-05-06
List price: $29.95
ISBN-10: 184520168X
ISBN-13: 9781845201685

Film Fables traces the history of modern cinema, moving effortlessly from Eisenstein’s and Murnau’s transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang’s confrontation with television, from the classical poetics of Mann’s Westerns to Ray’s romantic poetics of the image, from Rossellini’s neo-realism to Deleuze’s philosophy of the cinema and Marker’s documentaries. Film Fables traces the history of modern cinema, moving effortlessly from Eisenstein’s and Murnau’s transition from theatre to film to Fritz Lang’s

Authors:Daniel Miller, Don Slater,
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Keywords: approach, ethnographic, internet
Number of Pages: 224
Published: 2001-07-01
List price: $32.95
ISBN-10: 1859733891
ISBN-13: 9781859733899

An examination of Internet culture and consumption. The Internet is increasingly shaping, and being shaped by, users’ lives. From cybercafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, the authors have gathered material on subjects as varied as personal relations, commerce, sex and religion. Websites are also analyzed as new cultural formations acting as aesthetic traps. At every point, email chat and surfing are found to be exploited in ways that bring out both unforeseen attributes of the Internet and the contradictions of modern life. The material, taken from eth

Authors:John Brewer, Frank Trentmann,
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Keywords: cultures, transnational, exchanges, consumption, trajectories, historical, global, perspectives, consuming
Number of Pages: 317
Published: 2006-08-08
List price: $37.95
ISBN-10: 1845202473
ISBN-13: 9781845202477

Drawing on case studies from around the world, a trans-national perspective allows the authors to look at the genealogy of the modern consumer and the development of consumer cultures, from the porcelain trade and consumption in Britain and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to post Second World War developments in America and Japan, and the contemporary consumer politics of cosmopolitan citizenship.

Author: Jukka Gronow
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Keywords: russia, leisure, consumption, culture, stalin, life, champagne, common, luxury, ideals, caviar
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2004-04-24
List price: $37.95
ISBN-10: 1859736386
ISBN-13: 9781859736388

"Life has become more joyous, comrades."--Josef Stalin, 1936Stalin’s Russia is best known for its political repression, forced collectivization and general poverty. Caviar with Champagne presents an altogether different aspect of Stalin’s rule that has never been fully analyzed - the creation of a luxury goods society. At the same time as millions were queuing for bread and starving, drastic changes took place in the cultural and economic policy of the country, which had important consequences for the development of Soviet material culture and the promotion of its ideals of consumption.The

Author: Kevin Dawe
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Keywords: musics, island
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2004-09-04
List price: $37.95
ISBN-10: 185973703X
ISBN-13: 9781859737033

From the sounds of reggae in the Caribbean to the dance club beat of Ibiza, islands tend to develop a unique musical culture. What does the music of Cuba or Trinidad tell us about the islands themselves and their inhabitants? Is there something unique about island music? How does island music differ from its mainland counterparts? What is the role of "world music," global tourism, films, and travel writing in constructing a fanciful image of island life? Drawing on a range of examples from around the globe, this book examines the culture of island music and offers insight into local identities